Why foundational in-person experience still matters, and why so few coaches want to do the hard yards

Since when did recruitment decisions involve negotiating a side hustle?

It feels like everyone in the fitness industry has one, which means nobody, especially those starting out, gets good at the thing they’re actually employed to do.

Want to be an online coach? You’ll be a far better one if you’ve spent five years doing in-person training. You’ll understand the job properly. You’ll know what it’s like to work with hundreds of different bodies and personalities. You’ll know what it takes to support people through a journey. And because of that, you’ll be a better online coach.

If you can’t be the best in-person trainer in your postcode, don’t try to be the best online coach in the world.

The gig-economy mindset is bleeding into fitness

This is part of the gig-economy mindset that’s crept into the sector. People are doing a bit of online and a bit of one-to-one, wanting the security of employment without wanting to do the graft the job actually requires.

It doesn’t work. Not at the start. There’s a toll, and you’ve got to pay it.

We’ve forgotten we’re a service industry

We’ve also developed this odd dynamic where people have become hypersensitive to how they feel, to the point they’ve forgotten it’s not about them.

We’re in the service industry. Yes, you need technical knowledge. But fundamentally, we’re waiters with dumbbells. I say that half-jokingly, but there’s a real lack of work ethic in parts of the sector.

If you want to run a fast marathon, you expect to be out in winter, suffering. That’s how you get good.

So why would you expect to be a great PT or gym owner when you haven’t done the hard yards?

Don’t aim for “optimal”, develop resilience

Sometimes that means doing things that aren’t “optimal”: sleeping less than six hours, being dehydrated or having three coffees at the wrong time.

That’s normal. And, I’d argue, healthy.

It’s hard to say any of this now. You instantly become the old-school dinosaur who “doesn’t get it.” I keep being told the workforce is different now and we have to adapt.

Well, no. I’m not dropping my standards. I’m not running my team to the lowest-common-denominator.

High-performing gyms need high-performing people

I want a high-performing environment. We don’t always get it right, but we need to be demanding. We need to stay true to what got us here.

One thing I am having to accept is that not everyone brings founder energy.

People with founder energy run through brick walls. Their question isn’t “how many hours do I need to do?” It’s “what needs to get done?”

That’s the mindset I respect.

How to hire great coaches: recruitment strategies that work

Always be recruiting

If you need good staff, you need a pipeline of good people and you need to be constantly building that pipeline. It’s very difficult to recruit just starting from scratch. A bit like if you were building a funnel for customers; if you need customers today you don’t start today. You’d build the funnel over time so that you have a pool of people to pull from.

Be clear on the type of people you want

What characteristics, experiences and personality traits do you want from somebody in a given role? For us, what we look for in the coaching team is different to what we look for in the management team, which is different from what we look for in the leadership team.

Make the process immersive

We don’t really look too hard at CVs. We don’t formally interview. Everything we do from an interview standpoint is more informal and the process is immersive. So you come in and you’re on the job. You’re in the gym, you’re coaching, you’re around the team. You’re around the members in a structured coaching capacity, but also in informal social hangouts. So we can see you in the wild, as it were, as opposed to in a cage.

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